Hydrological Response to Natural and Anthropogenic Factors in Southern Taiwan

Abstract

Global climate change and rapid industrial development have led to changes in streamflow worldwide, and determining the relative contributions from climate variability and human activity is important for water management. However, studies using attribution analysis to investigate the streamflow in Taiwan are scarce. In this study, statistical methods are used to evaluate the changes in streamflow in order to assess the variation in the hydrological environment of Taiwan. Four river basins in Southern Taiwan were selected as the study area. The impact of climate variability and human activities on the changes in the streamflow from 1980 to 2017 was quantified via the hydrological sensitivity-based method and the decomposition method, which is based on the Budyko hypothesis. The results from these two methods were consistent and demonstrated that the increase in the streamflow of the four river basins was mainly attributable to climate variability. Streamflow change was more responsive to precipitation because of the relatively larger value of the sensitivity coefficients. This study provides a basic insight into the hydrological dynamics of river basins in Southern Taiwan and may serve as a reference for related research in the future.

Attribution of Streamflow Variations in Southern Taiwan

“…The results of this study were shown to be similar with a previous publication [45], that streamflow variations are mainly due to the climate factor. However, this research extended the study area to almost the whole of southern Taiwan and screened the best fitting Budyko-type equation with given processes.…”

“…Evidently, the change of the hydrological environment in southern Taiwan requires more attention to satisfy the future demand for water resources. Yeh and Tsao [45] have already evaluated the attributions of streamflow variations in southern Taiwan. However, just four river basins were selected as study areas in the previous publication, based on the available hydrological and meteorological datasets from gauging stations.…”

Attribution analysis of the spatiotemporal variation in water balance in a typical semiarid basin in northern China

“…The impacts of climate change and anthropogenic factors on hydrological regimes and water resources have been analysed in various regions across the world (Gao et al, 2020; Oliveira et al, 2019; Pirnia et al, 2019; Setti et al, 2020; Shi et al, 2019; Yeh & Tsao, 2020) through these three main approaches: the hydrological model method (Bao et al, 2019), the paired‐basin method (Van Loon et al, 2019), and the time series analysis method (Xu et al, 2014). The hydrological model method quantifies the effects of human activities and climate change on hydrology by fixing the climate scenarios or landscape conditions (Bu et al, 2018; Hu et al, 2020; Liu et al, 2019; Yang et al, 2019).…”